Obama's war in Libya might be wasteful and naive – but it's liberal, not neocon

With friends like liberals, who needs enemies? Barack Obama has done what he promised to do in Libya: dislodge a dictator and liberate a country without sacrificing Western soldiers. Yet all Obama’s liberal allies do is moan. Trapped between a Right and a Left who vacillate from demanding “all-out-war on everyone who deserves it” to “unconditional surrender to anyone who demands it”, he looks lonelier by the minute. Only Muammar Gaddafi has fewer friends (and, given his tenacity, Gaddafi may stay in office longer).

But Obama's Left-wing critics are wrong when they call him George Bush Mark II. His foreign policy is liberal all the way – right down to its frustrating mix of decency, cowardice and confusion.

In the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, the American Left said that everything the USA did abroad was liable to become a “second Vietnam” – from Grenada to Kuwait. The “second Vietnam” didn’t actually come until 2003, when the stock analogy suddenly became “another Iraq”. Now every time America engages forcefully with the world the Left labels it “another Iraq.” For liberals, foreign policy isn’t a rational exercise in power politics. It’s a never-ending cycle of generational angst.

Libya has been no exception. Mehdi Hasan writes in the New Statesman, “Allow me to take you on a short trip down memory lane”, before taking us on a very long trip down memory lane – via Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Seumas Milne of the Guardian says, “They don't give up. For the third time in a decade, British and US forces have played the decisive role in the overthrow of an Arab or Muslim regime… The lessons of the West's blood-drenched occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are said to have been learned… But the echoes of Baghdad and, even more, Kabul have been eerie.” And Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com opines, “No matter how heinous you believe Gaddafi was…; no matter how vast you believe the differences are between Libya and Iraq…; this specific Iraq lesson cannot be evaded. When foreign powers use military force to help remove a tyrannical regime that has ruled for decades, all sorts of chaos, violence, instability, and suffering – along with a slew of unpredictable outcomes – are inevitable.”

That analysis smacks of Marxist determinism. It suggests that history works by a fixed pattern, when it patently does not. The human narrative is conditioned by personality, events, misfortune, even bad weather. That’s why no two wars are ever the same, or why countries that are geographically close are culturally dissimilar (as in Britain has never had a revolution but the French are revolting by nature). The proposition also suggests that there is no role for leadership in history – that there is nothing we can do to reverse the tide of human frailty. Yet, just because something has gone awry before, do we not have a moral responsibility to tempt fate and try to make things right? History teaches us that if we dive into the stormy sea to save a drowning man, we will most likely drown too. But don’t we have a moral responsibility to try?

Moreover, Obama’s Left-wing critics are wrong to suggest that his policy fits a historical pattern that is neoconservative – that Libya has nothing to with them. The Obama Doctrine takes the globalism of the Bush era, throws in some liberal humanitarianism and acts with a realism rooted in the Iraq War experience. That’s why the President has taken a multilateral approach to Libya and refused to put American boots on the ground – precisely because he has taken Glenn Greenwald’s lesson from history. Barack Obama isn’t replaying Iraq; he’s reacting negatively to it and trying to avoid its many mistakes. The wars may reach the same terrible conclusion: but if so, it'll be for different reasons. Bush’s single-minded unilateralism brutalised Iraq and caused chaos. Obama’s vagueness has created a vacuum of leadership in Libya that has, likewise, encouraged anarchy. But neither case proves the eternal uselessness of military action, just the necessity for rethinking America’s role in the world in a new way.

There is a case for saying that this is a very liberal war. Liberals certainly created the language and ideas that have been used to justify it. Re-reading Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, what stands out is his reverence for the liberal tradition. He quoted John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and even Gandhi in his justifications for “humanitarian intervention”, or the moral responsibility individuals and nations have to oppose evil. Tellingly, he invoked the application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a condition for a “just peace.” He said, “For some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development… I reject [that]. I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear.”

Bush got rid of the Taliban and Saddam for strategic reasons. Obama has dislodged Gaddafi as a humanitarian gesture – to prevent a massacre in Benghazi and grant Libyans the vote. There is no obvious threat to American interests by Libya, no grand tactical thesis. This is a war for human rights: an effort to extend the reach of the American Civil Liberties Union to North Africa. It’s about liberating men from prisons and women from the burqa. It might be naive, wasteful and ultimately useless, but conservative it isn’t.